Conversion

The contact form is the business

We have now found four small-business websites in a row with a contact form that cannot be replied to. No email field, no phone field. Every enquiry sent through it goes nowhere, and nobody knows.

Gerard Mensah · Mensah Labs · 6 min read

It is the least glamorous part of a website and it is the only part that has to work. Everything else — the photography, the copy, the animation on the hero — exists to get somebody to that form. If the form is broken, none of the rest of it did anything.

The failure is almost always the same, and it is almost never noticed, because the person who owns the business never fills in their own form.

How it happens

Nobody sets out to build a form that cannot be replied to. It happens through a chain of small, reasonable-looking decisions.

Somebody builds the site on a template. The template ships with a contact block containing three fields: Name, Email, Message. It works. Then, months later, somebody decides the form looks long, or the theme gets updated, or a plugin gets swapped, and a field disappears. Or the form is rebuilt in a page builder and only two fields get dragged across.

The form still submits. It still shows the green tick and the words "Thanks, we will be in touch." The owner tests it once, sees the green tick, and concludes it works.

The green tick is the problem. It confirms the message was sent. It does not confirm anybody can answer it.

Meanwhile the notification email lands in an inbox with a name and a paragraph of text and no way to reply. Sometimes it lands in spam. Sometimes it goes to an address nobody has opened since the site was built. The enquiry is real, the person was interested, and it is gone.

What it actually costs

Do the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than ours, but the shape of it is this. A small service business might get somewhere between two and ten enquiries a month through its website. Say five. Say you convert one in four. Say your average job is £2,000.

That is roughly £2,500 a month leaving through a missing input field. Over a year it is the difference between a business that is working and one that is not, and it is invisible, because you cannot count the enquiries you never received.

The worst part is not the money. It is that the people who tried to contact you do not know the form was broken. They know they messaged a business and got ignored. Some of them tell other people that.

How to check yours in five minutes

1. Fill it in yourself, properly. Not with "test test test" — with a real message and a real address you can check. Send it from your phone, on mobile data, not from your office wifi.
2. Now open the email that arrives. Can you hit reply and reach the sender? If the reply-to is your own domain, or there is no email address in the body, the form is broken.
3. Check your spam folder, and check any shared inbox the form might be pointing at. Forms built years ago often still point at an address that was set up for a previous employee.
4. Do it again from a different device. Some forms fail only on mobile, which is where most of your traffic is.
5. Check the required fields. If email is not marked required, some people will leave it blank and you will get an anonymous message.

What good looks like

A form that works is not complicated. Name, email, phone, and a message box. Email marked required and validated. A phone number written out in text next to the form for the people who would rather ring. An address that goes to a monitored inbox, with a copy to a second address as a backup.

Then a confirmation screen that says something true — not "we will be in touch shortly" if you answer in two days. Say two days. People plan around honest timescales and resent optimistic ones.

And finally: put a reminder in your calendar to test it every quarter. Themes update, plugins change, email providers tighten their spam rules. A form that worked in January is not guaranteed to work in June.

Why we lead with this

When we do a free Diagnosis, the contact form is the first thing we test, because it is the finding most likely to pay for itself immediately. We have told people to fix their form and nothing else, and walked away from the larger job, because a redesign would not have changed as much.

If your form is broken we will tell you, and if it takes us under two hours we will fix it for nothing, whether or not you ever hire us.